Earlier this week during a regularly scheduled meeting, the Woodland Joint Unified School District Board of Trustees unanimously voted to hold a special election in November to fill the vacant Area Two seat formerly held by Emily MacDonald.
The vote to hold an election this past Tuesday rather than make a provisional appointment was expected after board members expressed their intent to order a special election during their March 28 meeting.
The winner of the special election set for election day Nov. 5 will serve the rest of MacDonald's term, which is set to expire in December 2026.
According to comments made during the March 25 board meeting, the cost to the WJUSD to order a special election on Nov. 5 is estimated to be between $10,000 and $20,000 due to sharing the cost of election administration with every other local agency holding an election at the same time.
If the board decided on a different option and held a special mail-in election on Aug. 27, the cost would be estimated at $200,0000. A potential lack of voter turnout in August was also discussed.
On March 12, MacDonald officially resigned effective immediately following a successful recall effort that landed on the March 5 primary election ballot for Area 2 voters. Out of 1,403 total votes in Area 2, 893 were in favor of a recall with 510 against it.
Area 2 is rectangle-shaped with its southern border running along Lincoln Avenue from County Road 98 to East Street and its northern border running along Beamer Street.
In November 2023, Area 2 voters gathered 1,349 signatures to file a petition with the Yolo County Elections office to recall MacDonald from the position. The petition came about following comments made by MacDonald after a unanimous trustee vote approving a resolution adopting June 2023 as LGBTQI+ Pride Month.
During the June 15, 2023, regularly scheduled school board meeting, MacDonald read aloud a statement that was considered by many community members hateful to LGBTQIA+ youth.
She began by claiming that transgender people force people to accept every aspect of "transgenderism" to be considered allies to other members of the LGBTQIA+ community despite presenting no evidence of this.
MacDonald then continued on about how transgender identification has more than doubled in five years, particularly among teenage girls, with little to no evidence to support this suggesting that the increase "defies any reasonable explanation" suggesting that it must be "some degree of social contagion."
"…We must act with great caution in order to protect the increasing numbers of children who are experiencing transgender procedures as a result of social contagion without sacrificing the tiny number of individuals who identify as transgender even without social contagion, education campaigns and the social cache attached to a transgender identity in the present. Thank you," she concluded.
Those comments led to an outpouring of public comment during a meeting in late June 2023, both in support and against her comments.
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